Saturday, 23 April 2016

Shakespeare died 400 years ago this week. His writings, and
tendentious fantasies about his life, are being celebrated, especially in
Stratford-Upon-Avon. ‘Celebrated’ here means in most cases ‘Made accessible’,
and ‘Made accessible’ means in all cases trivialized.

Shakespeare was a Poet and Playwright. You do not alter so much as a punctuation mark
in a poet’ work. Plays are to be performed: people who have been bored sick at
school when made to read
Shakespeare’s plays (I was one such) very often change their minds completely
and enthusiastically once they have seen an actual and at least competent
performance of one of his plays (The RSC often really screws up I’m afraid,
especially in its Stratford productions. Amateur or school productions are
often better).

But isn’t the language ‘difficult’? Well, yes, if you’re not
used to it. And present mores seem to dictate that if something’s ‘difficult’
then it should be either abolished or simplified. God forbid that anyone should
be asked to make the effort of reading, with someone who already knows and
understands Shakespeare’s writings, say, one act of a play, or two or three of
the sonnets. It might take as long as a couple of hours, but I guarantee — I’ve
tried it with several not-very-well-educated young people — that the result
would be an ability to understand at sight or hearing most of what Shakespeare
wrote.

Thursday, 21 April 2016

As a professional
writer I want as many people as possible to read my stuff, but (except when I
myself choose to make something freely available) I do expect to be asked, and
even paid, when people want to copy it. Contrary to popular opinion, writers do
not live entirely on fresh air.

I am
therefore a member of the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society, which
supports writers by, among other things, collecting photocopying fees from
libraries and universities and sending it on to the writers. Once a year I get
a very welcome cheque for somewhere between £50 and £100.

Google, it
seems, does not give a nun’s wimple for the rights of authors, though it is
happy to make large sums of money out of their work. I thought the following
item, from the ALCS’s newsletter, deserved a wider audience, and where better
to put it than on a blog that is run by Google?

ALCS News Bulletin: April 2016

Google wins book
scanning lawsuit

20/04/2016

The US Supreme Court has ruled in
favour of Google in a copyright infringement case filed by The Authors Guild
that has spanned eleven years.

Millions of books were copied by Google without prior permission as part of a
digitisation project that allows small extracts of the works to be viewed
online. This led The Authors Guild in the US to file its lawsuit in 2005.

Following the rejection by the
courts of a proposed settlement and years of subsequent litigation, in October
2015 the appeals court ruled that Google’s activity fell within the ‘Fair Use’
doctrine prescribed by US copyright law. Given that the case involved copying
on a grand scale by a large, commercial organisation, The Authors Guild hoped
that the US Supreme Court would review the ruling. However, in its final
decision yesterday, the Supreme Court resolved not to review the case.

Google has denied any infringement throughout the case, claiming that its digitisation
project fell under ‘fair use’ of protected works and that it served the public
interest. The Authors’ Guild has always expressed its concern that Google did
not seek prior permission of the authors concerned and has long-argued that the
project undermined authors’ ability to make money from their works.

Responding in a statement to the US Supreme Court ruling, The Authors Guild
called the decision a “colossal loss” stating that authors should be paid when
their work is copied for commercial purposes. The Guild vowed to continue to
monitor Google and its library partners to ensure that the fair use terms
acknowledged by the decision are not abused.

Mary Rasenberger, Executive Director of The Authors Guild commented: “The price
of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American
culture… Authors are already among the most poorly paid workers in America; if
tomorrow’s authors cannot make a living from their work, only the independently
wealthy or the subsidized will be able to pursue a career in writing, and
America’s intellectual and artistic soul will be impoverished.”

Owen Atkinson, Chief Executive of ALCS, commented on the ruling: “The digital
environment provides unprecedented opportunities for accessing published content,
creating new value for distributors and consumers. This is a success story
written by authors and yet they are fading fast from the narrative. A fairer,
more balanced approach is needed, one which recognises that content creators,
such as authors, are the only truly irreplaceable link in the digital value
chain.”

Sunday, 17 April 2016

Lewis Carroll, real name Charles
Dodgson, has several direct or indirect claims to fame or, some would say,
notoriety. He is best known now as the author of the ‘Alice’ books, written to
entertain Alice Liddell, the little daughter of Henry George Liddell, who was
the co-compiler of the still standard huge English dictionary of Ancient Greek (Henry, not Alice. (Duh)).
Carroll was a very fine photographer, and many of his photographs are of little
girls not wearing very much. In this post-Freudian witch-hunting age this
excites great suspicion among the prurient, though I don’t think anyone at the
time thought there was anything odd about it. Certainly Carroll himself would
have been horrified and disgusted at the suggestion there might have been
anything sexual (as of course there was) in his interest. We now know of course
— and the really suspect people are those who strenuously deny it — that all
human relations have a (perhaps unacknowledged) sexual element.

Anyway that’s more than enough
about that. Carroll / Dodgson lectured at Oxford University in Mathematics and
especially in logic. Some of his more elementary work in logic had much of the
wit of his stories and verses; here is an example:

(a) All babies are
illogical.

(b) Nobody is despised
who can manage a crocodile.

(c) Illogical persons
are despised.

As the subjects of this puzzle
are people, we take the universe as the set of all people. We will rewrite each
statement in the puzzle as an implication. First we define simpler statements,

B : it is a baby

L : it is logical

M : it can manage a crocodile

D : it is despised ,

where “it” in this context refers to a general
person. Then the three statements can be rephrased as

(a) B → ~L : If it is a baby
then it is not logical.

(b) M → ~D : If it can manage a
crocodile then it is not despised.

(c) ~L → D : If it is not
logical then it is despised.

Our aim is to use transitive reasoning several
times, stringing together a chain of implications using all the given
statements. We have an arrow pointing from B to ~L, and likewise an arrow
pointing from ~L to D; thus we are able to start with B and arrive at the
conclusion D. However, the second statement is still not utilized. But since
any implication is equivalent to its contrapositive, we may replace the second
statement with its contrapositive D → ~M. Then we get the transitive reasoning
chain

B → ~L →
D → ~M .

We reason that if B is true, then ~L is true, hence
D is true, and therefore ~M is true. Our ultimate conclusion is the statement

B → ~M :
If it is a baby then it cannot manage a crocodile .

In ordinary language we would more likely rephrase
this answer to the puzzle as

“No baby
can manage a crocodile.”

Alternatively, we could write the answer as the
contrapositive statement

Wednesday, 6 April 2016

That’s the catchily alliterative name that has been given to
the huge collection of documents (not as a rule in fact in paper form) leaked
from a law company in Panama; a company whose registered office is in fact in
one of those ex British colonies that have long experience of devious financial
dealings.

The papers reveal corruption, money-laundering, the usual
trappings of grotesque greed, in ‘high places’. There have been cries of outrage,
demonstrations in the streets, calls for enquiries, and resignations of ‘important’
people in all the countries affected.

All but one. In the U.K., which the documents show to be one
of the most unscrupulous of all states, there have been nothing but shrugs of
indifference. Why? Well, as with so many of the nastier aspects of Britain, it
is the legacy of Thatcher and her toadies. Thatcher — and let us not forget
that Britain is a fairly democratic country, so Thatcher was in power because
the British people wanted her in power — had no real sense of right and wrong.
If something was profitable, it was right; the notion that something could be
profitable but wrong would have seemed to her a simple logical contradiction;
the words ‘Right’ and ‘Profitable’ were virtually synonyms. The only values
were monetary ones.

Lots of people have been saying ‘I’ve done nothing wrong’.
No, of course they haven’t. “What do you mean, ‘Wrong’? I made a big profit!”

Tuesday, 5 April 2016

I mentioned the other day that among my current bedside
books is/are the collected poems of Marianne Moore. I said that she’s supposed
to be good, and so I’d persevere with reading one poem a day, but up to now her
poems seem to be slight and whimsical; little sketches provoked perhaps by
oddities found in her own bedside bookshelf.

But now, suddenly, with the poem ‘What Are Years?’, the
title poem of a 1941 collection, she seems at last to be saying (or writing)
something worth hearing (or reading). The poem is similar to, but better, less
blatant than, Spender’s ‘I think continually of those who were truly great.’

I have not yet read further in this collection, but it’s
been worth all the preceding stuff to come at last to this fine poem.

Sunday, 3 April 2016

The other day I said some things that might be
misinterpreted as derogatory towards that lovely instrument the viola. In many
ways the Cinderella among stringed instruments, it has very few well-known solo
works in its repertoire: the best known are Berlioz’s ‘Harold in Italy’ and the
concerto by William Walton.

I don’t know if it was a guilty conscience that prompted me,
but today I listened to Mozart’s ‘Sinfonia Concertante’ — actually a concerto
for violin and viola, demanding a greater rapport between the two solo
instruments than in an extended operatic duet — twice; once after breakfast and
once after dinner. I’m afraid that as it was on my watch-sized MP3 player I no
longer know whose recording it was, but it was a very good one.

The work shows the viola at its best. I said viola players
are odd: perhaps they are, but perhaps their oddity consists in an
unfashionable humility; a lack of the desire to be the big solo star; a
willingness to co-operate with other players and not try to outshine them. Perhaps
it’s viola players who really hold string quartets - the single malts of serious music - together.

Or perhaps it’s just that the Sinfonia Concertante is one of
Mozart’s greatest orchestral works. Anyway, anyone who ever felt or said
anything ‘witty’ about the viola (the difference between it and the violin is
that it takes slightly longer to burn) should listen — twice a day — to this
work.

Saturday, 2 April 2016

That’s the title of a book I read a year or two ago; a paean
to cigarettes written by someone as a prelude to giving them up. Full of
descriptions of the pleasures of smoking and vignettes of well-known literary
and artistic smokers, it had of course the opposite effect on me. But following
the recent trauma of a haemopneumothorax and the horrific hospital treatment
needed, I’m making some effort to reduce my smoking. By dint of giving all my
cigarettes to a couple of friends, with instructions to bring me one or two
several times a day, I’ve got it down from 25 – 30 a day to 10 – 12. Much of
the time it’s a matter of having a cigarette on the desk beside me, and saying
to myself ‘No, I won’t smoke it yet; I’ll wait until the next cup of tea or
shot of ouzo.’ This ability to defer a pleasure is generally regarded as a sign
of maturity, of grown-upness. But I don’t actually rate grown-upness at all
highly: I find the spontaneity, the lust for immediate gratification, of the
very young far more attractive. Still, so far I’m not doing badly, but then I’m
still feeling weak and fragile; I fear it may creep up again when I’m feeling
better.

Now seems a good time to express my heartfelt thanks to the
many people who have given me the benefit of their advice — usually in the form
of a long highly didactic lecture that brooks no interruption — on exactly how
to give up smoking. It really is most generous of these people to offer — no,
to press upon me — their help, especially as in not one single case did I have
to go to the trouble of actually asking for
their valuable opinion.

Friday, 1 April 2016

It is usual on April the first to write spoof news reports
and I suppose blog entries. But when the president of the United States visits
the country where he keeps a special prison for torturing people and berates
that country for its human rights record, then a few days later as the
president of the only country that has ever actually used nuclear weapons waxes
indignant because a small country on the other side of the world seems to want
to have such weapons itself, it’s hard to know what is truth and what spoof.

Meanwhile in England a viola player is suing his orchestra
because his hearing has been permanently damaged: it seems the conductor had
seated the violas too close to the brass for a performance of something by
Wagner.

Actually I do sympathise, even though the only times I have
ever played in orchestras it has been in the brass section: sometimes on
trumpet, sometimes on horn. Horn players can have almost the opposite problem
to our violist: the horn has the reputation of being the most difficult of all
instruments and certainly if you hear a cracked note from an orchestra it is
likely to be the horns. For technical reasons, the same fingering can produce
many different notes on the horn, and it’s only by very fine lip and breath
control that one can select the right one. If the conductor puts the horns too
close to the timpani, the shock-wave from a goodly drum-bash can be picked up
by the bell of the horn and be sort of hydraulically concentrated as it travels
through the several metres of brass tube to emerge in a puff that can blast the
player’s lips right off the mouthpiece. (That is not, by the way, the reason
horn players stuff their right hand up the bell.)

Still, viola players are always odd. Look at a photograph of
any string quartet: I guarantee that the one who looks weirdest is the violist.